Out of all these glooms into which we have strayed, and out of the ironies of Nature and life, there is no escape by the avenues of thought, but only by turning from thought to deed. The social and moral activities for those who live in them neutralize or else compensate these intellectual sorrows, and keep the importunities of Momus in check. It belongs to the moral sentiment, or rather it belongs to the morally regenerate will, to create for itself a world into which no irony can enter but the blessed irony of God, the reserve which is not limitation and negation and death, but yea behind yea, and life upon life. Love is the anointing of the eyes which transfigures Erebus itself into yea, or makes it invisible. Every really good deed, every genuine act of self-sacrifice, is immortal, a birth from the heart of the Divine; the everlasting morning is in it, the gates of hell are powerless, and Mephistopheles leers in vain.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF FETICHISM.

[From the Unitarian Review, March, 1881.]

EMERSON in one of his poems complains

that

"Things are in the saddle,

And ride mankind."

The saying is true in other senses than that of the exigence of material interests, which is what the poet intended by it.

Mankind, the world over, in divers ways are ridden by "things," possessed by them, enthralled by them. Nor is it always a preponderant materialism that imposes this thrall. Materialism is not the normal faith of human kind, but an aberration. There are philosophers who ignore the agency of spirit in phenomenal nature, and there are worldlings who rest in sensual satisfactions, or satisfactions derived from material values; but naturally man is more spiritualist than materialist, and there is an interest in things, and an action of things on the mind, which attests the supremacy of spirit in human life. Every thing was first a thought, and only thinking makes things.

The savage, groping after Deity, makes a god of

some object which tradition or his own fancy has consecrated,—a block, an elephant's tooth, a misshapen stone, a tree struck by lightning,- things which possess no virtue or value but what they derive from his thought. These are instances of that creature-worship which constitutes a stage of religion in the savage mind. Is the savage then a materialist? Are these homages proof of that utter want of a spiritual sense which vulgar opinion ascribes to him? On the contrary, they attest an overruling spiritualism, which refuses to see in what we call matter mere inert substance, or in brutes mere animated dust, but feels itself, even there, confronted by a conscious and an awful Presence. The savage feels his littleness and helplessness in view of the great outside, the Not-me, which everywhere surrounds him. Awed by the overweight of visible Nature, he divines the presence of an invisible Power. In his attempt to lay hold of this Power, he fails to disengage it from the visible All which embodies it. He seems to himself to catch its aspect, here.and there, in some object which strikes him as possessing peculiar significance, which individualizes, so to speak, the all-present mystery, and thrusts it on his fancy or his fear.

This is religion in-I will not say its earliest, for that is a disputed point—but religion in its

crudest state. Yet how near to the pantheism of some of the most cultured and profoundest minds ! We call it Fetichism, a term introduced by De Brosses, who coined it from the Portuguese fetisso, an amulet, or charm. The fetisso is not necessarily a god; but the tribes most addicted to the use of these things are those with whom creature-worship chiefly prevails.

Fetichism is the worship of things, of brute creatures, animate or inanimate, — worship of them, not for their material value, or any use which they serve, but for the demon's sake supposed to reside in them. All this is so foreign to our conception of Godhead, so abhorrent from all our traditions, as to seem almost a wilful aberration. Theologians, possessed with the notion of man's declension from primitive reason, find here a confirmation of that hypothesis. Accordingly, fetichism has become a term of reproach. It stands in the popular apprehension for something monstrous and utterly vile, as contrasted with the uses of revealed religion. But these are not the test by which it should be judged. Let it rather be compared with the stark irreligion, the crass sensualism of either savage or civilized man. I wish to place it in a more favorable light, to emphasize its better side.

Fetichism is not materialism. It is one of the first proofs of a spirit in man akin to the divine,

that he can thus invest inferior, and even inanimate, creatures with the attributes of Deity. That man, himself the image of Godhead, can see divinity in stocks and stones, can adore the superhuman in a crocodile or the stump of a tree, attests the vitality of the God-seeking instinct, which, for want of direction, in the absence of the true light, is driven. to make a god of such objects as these, laying hold of whatever by accident of mood or association has hit its dim presentiment with a fancied air of supernaturalness.

In a more advanced stage of humanity fetichism sometimes assumes a different character. Where it does not rise into symbolism, it may sink into sensualism, mechanical converse with idols, like the teraphim which Rachel abstracted from her father Laban, or like the gods which Birmingham is said to manufacture for the use of the Hindoos.

But the fetichist proper, the creature-worshipping savage, is no sensualist, is no materialist. He sees spirit everywhere. The whole external world to him is magical, demoniacal. Every senseless object is informed with life. He has not yet learned to distinguish between person and thing. All is person that happens to attract his special regard.

I find here proof of an inborn spiritualism, or call it idealism, or immaterialism, which shows itself wherever human nature is found in its aboriginal